My blog - from 2003 to 2016

Bad experience with my new digital SLR

A fortnight or so ago I got a new Nikon D50 digital SLR from the Jessops store in Bluewater. After a lot of research online and in photography magazines, we’d opted for this entry-level digital SLR.

Jessops run a price match scheme, where they will match the price that any internet retailer is offering. This shaved a few pounds off for the retail price for us.

We took the camera away on a week-long holiday, armed with two new 512Mb SD cards (one Kingston and one Sandisk). We merrily filled both cards with JPG images that looked great on the preview screen.

However once we got home today and I downloaded the images onto our PC, a fair number of the images were corrupted. Over the two cards I had taken 326 images, of which 151 were corrupted. They won’t open in any graphics package, and they can’t be rescued using any of the recovery software I’ve tried (Photorescue, Pixrecovery, Photosrecovery).

The problem definitely isn’t the SD cards (completely different brands, images corrupted on both) or the way data was transferred to the PC (different method used for each). So I can only conclude the camera is faulty.

Here are some of the images that weren’t completely corrupted, but clearly aren’t right:

I’m really gutted to lose so many pictures from my holidays, particularly as I shot a number of test images before I went away. Plus I’ve had to shell out for recovery software to get back what images I could.

I’m going to get in touch with the Jessops branch tomorrow to see what they are going to do. It’s going to be interesting to see how their customer service is – the only reason I went to them instead of buying online was because of their internet price match, and the the fact that any technical problems could be dealt with face to face.

Let’s see whether my second assumption actually works…

Update Saturday 17 June, 2006

Went into my local Jessops and received good service – they were happy to exchange with no queries or quibbles. Seemed to know what they were talking about and gave me free digital picture printing vouchers as compensation for the cost of the recovery software.

Just goes to show that while the internet offers some very competitive pricing, customers should always remember that customer service is important as well, and many offline stores have an advantage compared to their online competitiors.